Events of historic significance related in the most ordinary and anecdotal way. (8 pp. b&w photos, not seen)
Emmett Till’s mother tells the story of his childhood, his vicious murder in 1955, the shameful and quick acquittal of his unrepentant killers by an all-white male jury, and the aftermath of it all.
It’s not disinterested history, and students will have a difficult time using this account, which contains no notes, no index, and only a perfunctory bibliography. Till-Mobley, who died in Jan. 2003 at age 81, told her story many times in myriad public appearances, but this is the first time she has published it, assisted by Ebony journalist Benson. The first third deals with the birth and childhood of her son, depicted as a model boy who embodied every human virtue. The author tells us that she was twice sexually molested as a child and that she was a superior student. Her first husband, Louis Till, was not much of a husband or father; we learn much later that he was executed in Italy during WWII for murder and rape, though the author suggests he might have been the victim of a legal lynching. Young Emmett, called “Bo” by everyone, contracted polio as a child in Chicago but experienced a miracle cure. The author married again, but threw her husband out when she discovered he’d been unfaithful. The truly gripping middle section deals with Emmett’s visit at age 14 to relatives in Mississippi, his kidnapping and murder by white racists, the funeral, and the trial. His mother recognizes the historical importance of these events, which awakened many Americans to the racist horrors suffered by blacks in the Deep South. In the years after his death, chronicled in the final third section, Till-Mobley married again (happily this time), went back to school, earned an honors degree, became a teacher, retired, attended many important functions, met many important people, and made many mesmerizing speeches.
Events of historic significance related in the most ordinary and anecdotal way. (8 pp. b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2003
ISBN: 1-4000-6117-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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